24 United States The Economist February 20th 2021
state directive requiring the admission of
covid-19 patients to homes may have put
residents at risk. But it was not until the
New York Post, a tabloid, revealed on Febru-
ary 11th that Mr Cuomo’s top aide privately
apologised to lawmakers for withholding
the nursing-home death toll that he began
to feel some heat. According to the news-
paper, the aide said the administration
“froze” because they did not want the then
president, Donald Trump, to “turn this into
a giant political football”.
The fact that the report was released by
an ally “is an emperor-has-no-clothes mo-
ment,” says John Kaehny of Reinvent Alba-
ny, a government watchdog. His group is
calling for full transparency on the state’s
response to covid-19. “The governor is in
trouble,” says Doug Muzzio, a political sci-
entist at Baruch College. Mr Cuomo usually
controls the narrative, but not this time.
On February 15th he held a 90-minute press
briefing in an attempt to retake the reins.
He stopped short of apologising, but ad-
mitted that mistakes were made.
Several lawmakers want to strip the
governor of emergency powers granted last
March (a near-empty gesture, as the pow-
ers expire in April). Some Republicans
want Mr Cuomo to resign (unlikely). New
Yorkers still seem happy with his handling
of the covid-19 crisis, according to a new
poll. More than 60% of voters say he has
done a good job. The poll was taken just be-
fore the New York Post’s revelation, but af-
ter the attorney-general’s scathing report.
The governor is in his third year of his
third term. The scandal may well put an
end to any fourth-term hopes. On February
17th, Ron Kim, a Democratic state assem-
blyman, toldcnnthat Mr Cuomo threat-
ened to “destroy” him when he refused to
back down from statements he had made
criticising the governor.
Mr Cuomo is used to getting his own
way. The state constitution affords him
most of the say over budgets. He has uni-
lateral power to withhold state funding
from programmes, agencies and author-
ities. But there is not much transparency in
how he gets things done. Many Albany in-
siders, observers and politicians were per-
plexed to see the world fawn over the Em-
pire State’s governor.
In a way Mr Cuomo was born to lead
New York. He learnt much about Albany
politics at the knee of his father Mario, a
former governor. His experience, probably
unparalleled in the 230-year history of
New York state, and the inherent powers of
his office have created a political mam-
moth able to crush anyone. Nine of his se-
nior officials who apparently disagreed
with him on policy have resigned or retired
recently; he remains. Mr Cuomo declared
during his first term: “I am the govern-
ment.” That is looking somewhat less cer-
tain than it was. N
ineteenth-century brick row-
houses on McKean Avenue, a once
humming, now rather desolate street in
west Baltimore where many homes have
been demolished or abandoned, can be
had for as little as $12,000. A more pop-
ular way to snap up a bit of historic Balti-
more is to spend nearly a quarter of that
at Room & Board, a furniture chain based
in Minneapolis, on a McKean media
cabinet, fashioned from roof-decking
planks from the city’s razed houses.
The planks come from the Baltimore
Wood Project, which was established by
the usForest Service as a joint venture
with local non-profits and the city, to
show how discarded wood can be kept
out of landfill. A lot of wood waste, which
releases carbon dioxide and methane as
it rots, has little sale value, but old build-
ings can yield precious salvage. The
yellow pine that was used to build Balti-
more’s rowhouses came from old-growth
forests, and is more dense and rot-resist-
ant than faster-growing new lumber; a
century of oxidation has given it a hand-
some, dark patina. Furniture-makers and
interior designers play up its prove-
nance, designing items around its joist-
and plank-shaped pieces, some of them
pocked with nail holes and saw marks.
They also advertise the fact that the
venture trains formerly unemployed
Baltimoreans, many of them former
prisoners, in deconstruction and salvag-
ing techniques.
Maryland’s biggest city, once a boom-
ing factory and port town, is fertile
ground for such a project. Its rowhouses,
constructed in sprawling grids and
quickly filled by immigrants from Eu-
rope during the brisk industrial growthof the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
began to empty in the second half of the
20th century, as its shipping and steel
industries declined. Since 1950, when
Baltimore was America’s sixth-biggest
city, a third of its residents have left;
today it is the 30th-biggest. In the poor-
est neighbourhoods, more than half of
adults are unemployed. Some 16,000
buildings are officially designated emp-
ty; the true number may be twice that.
Entire streets of still-handsome houses
are boarded up. The city is planning to
demolish thousands of them.
Projects like the Baltimore Wood
Project, which the Forest Service hopes
will take root in other cities, are likely to
remain small-scale. Deconstructing a
house in order to save the materials from
which it is built is more expensive and
time-consuming than going at it with a
wrecking ball. In some long-empty
houses with broken rooftops, all the
wood has been lost to rot. In the past six
years, as the project has salvaged wood
from around 850 houses, many more
have been reduced to rubble.
But the project has shown that con-
servation efforts can pay. Last year Brick
+ Board, the non-profit established to
sell the salvaged wood, became a for-
profit: it now sells reclaimed wood from
other towns and cities, as well as Balti-
more brick and the white marble stoops
that were once found at the front doors
of even the most modest old rowhouses.
These steps, one of Baltimore’s most
distinctive architectural hallmarks, are
likely to stay in the city. Their most en-
thusiastic buyers are gentrifiers, who
reuse them in neighbourhoods less
blighted by decline.Baltimore’s homesRescued charm
BALTIMORE
Abandoned homes are being recycled into furniture